Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

Pour tons ceux que j’ai baisés un jour

(au sens propre, au figuré, on autre).

For Henry Darger and his beloved Vivian Girls

It’s the taste of sea spray, of salt dried on my lips. That precise taste, licked away hours after I’ve left the shore. And it’s swimming a hundred yards out from land, over water that grows deeper and deeper below you, and it’s having no idea what is moving about beneath you. It’s this frisson, that fleeting or prolonged shudder. Fear that is not
only
fear, but that is equal parts pleasure and awe. I suspect this is what some people mean when they say
God
, or
god,
or
gods
, but rarely do those words appeal to me. Rather, the bleached skeleton of a gull in the dunes, or the feel of greenbriers against my skin. Lying alone in a room so dark that my eyes have no hope of discerning any genuine light, and so begin to create their own desperate whirls and flickers. It’s the taste of my blood, or anyone else’s, a kiss becomes a nip, a razor opening the skin of my shoulder to expose the crimson sea that flows inside me. It’s the thought of being consumed, willingly or by some grim seduction, slowly becoming one with some other, consciousness preserved or lost to digestive dissolution. Let us entertain the thought that what I am trying to communicate could be summed up by saying, simply, imagine gripping daemonic horns, those of a ram or gazelle or some other member of the Antilopinae (oh, and Pan comes immediately to mind, that sacred, rutting son of gods), and then the thrust from
without
, from without to
within
, and all the impossible things that might follow.

All these things are but the barest glimpse of what I mean when I speak of
weird erotica
, which comprises the bulk of the book in your hands. The intrusion—often by invitation—of the Outside into that most intimate and ancient act.

And the
Outside
is the
Unknown
, and, as Love craft tells us (Lovecraft who only
seems
a prude until one realizes how preoccupied so many of his stories are with sex, very weird sex, indeed, no matter what dim view he took), “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” And what can be more unknown than Death? And what is Death but our penultimate encounter with the Unknown (despite those who choose to delude themselves, and so believe otherwise): And now, now, sex and death—recall the French phrase for the orgasm,
la petite mort
, the small death—and we are almost to the abovementioned moment of frisson. There is an association between sex and death that may be as old as the consciousness of human beings, or that may predate our species and have first been felt by our australopithecine forbearers. In our mind, and I would argue in any objective sense that may exist
beyond
our minds, sex and death are merely two sides of a coin. Better yet, yin yang, only seeming to exist in opposition, but all the while intimately interconnected. And oh this sounds so preposterously cliché I want to erase it and write something else. But, often, that which is cliché is so because it’s profoundly fucking true. Sex is the author of death, and without death, without the clearing away of old life, there will be no further sex. The
Unknown
begets the little death, granting that gift, then delivers it again into that “strongest kind of fear.”

Undique enim ad inferos tantundem via est.

And this one I walk does not deny the certainty of death, nor of life, nor of the Unknown, nor of the Outside, nor of the strongest kind of fear and the undeniable link between all these things. Integral. Intertwined. I’m following-and not necessarily by
choice
, excepting I’ve refused self-denial—the paths of Ovid, de Sade, Swinburne, von Sacher-Masoch, Crowley,
Le Jardin des supplices
, Mapplethorpe, Wilde, Dorian Cleavenger, Giger, and here there is suddenly great frustration at naming so many males, so add Sappho, Angela Carter, Dion Arhus, Octavia Butler, Patricia Piccinini’s parahumans, Kiki Smith, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Karen Finley, Charlotte Koche, Diamanda Galás, Anaïs Nin, and the perplexing mess that is Anne Rice. And I almost forgot
Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol
. Yet few of these artists go even half far enough into the territories I’ve set myself to exploring. Oh, and I’m risking the insufferable
pretension
of name-dropping (bolstering the legitimacy of my work by making reference to more renowned artists), and how can I have named only
one
musician while I was at it?

Ah, well.

Well.

It is a well, you know. I dip into it again and again and again. In my “real” life and in my fictions and in all the interstitial spaces bridging these. So, as one who draws deeply from that well, endlessly, I may fairly be accused of committing a confession via these introductory comments. Of covering my guard, baring my “soul.” Choose your apothegm. In Olden Days, the Recent Past, even into this enlightened Twenty-First Century A.D., and even tomorrow, I would be/have been/am labeled a pervert, indecent, a degenerate, polymorphously perverse, a sinner, a sicko, a pornographer, depraved, and debauched. And only for stating truths that others so frequently shy away from admitting. We paint and spin tales and sing all our fantasies, violating the fabric of decent, factual
Reality
at every turn. Human beings tear down the crushing weight of their life prisons and erect blasphemous surrogates, and I dare say blasphemous because, in times not so very far past, the tamest of fantasies were deemed unhealthy to the mind of man (especially the minds of the children of men; legal persecution against sellers of comic books and marga spring at first to mind, and, in the same vein, the
de facto
censorship of New York Magistrate Charles F. Murphy’s Comics Code Authority, and also Fredric Wortham’s
Seduction of the Innocent).
So, yes. I freely admit that I respond to myself, my highest power, and lock denial of desire outside (not to be mistaken with the
Outside).
As do all those other fantasists so much less concerned with sex, or concerned not at all with sex, or even prudish in thinking themselves different from me not by degrees but by kind (to mangle the words of Charles Darwin, who gave me great insight into the mutability of flesh).

I go to the well. My perverse well of words.

I swim in those deep waters far from shore, not knowing what swims beneath me, and what might rise at any moment.
Asa fantasist,
I do this thing. I grip the horns of horned and rutting creatures.

I do not allow my ears to be plugged with beeswax against the songs of sirens. I delight at restraint and the pricking of my skin and the act of restraining, and a thousand imaginary monstrous lovers, a dozen lashes and countless other tortures, mutations and transfigurations (of mind and body), welcome alien violations, negations of gender, and we might go on like this quite a terribly long time. I think not many writers of the weird have ventured into these warpings of the world (and, no, not for a moment, do I count as comrades those recently teeming writers of “paranormal romance” and “shifter fiction,” for rarely do they accomplish anything more dangerous than dressing the safe and normative up in wolf’s clothing; these authors, and their readers, are merely
tourists).
I think that, but I may well be wrong. And if so, I stand corrected, and would wish someone to point me to those authors. You’d be doing me a kindness.

In exchange for my showing you the path down to the sea.

Which I am about to do.

Or, I should say, I am about to do again. IVe been doing this for years stacked upon years now, haven’t Ir It maybe I have cultivated an infamy, spawned an ill reputation, which I’d call an occupational hazard. For those who embrace the frisson, that fleeting or prolonged shudder. For those who show their darkest dreams and experiences to others (not to be mistaken with the
Other),
thereby opening themselves to accusations of corruption. But this is what fantasy does. Fantasy corrupts reality, as does dream. You can leave out all shameless mention genitals, the satyrs, of mermaids, of frog toes and tentacles, and fine, fine, fine, but this, I conclude, does not change a thing.

Death and sex, these are among the cornerstones of reality.

Pain and pleasure.

Fear of the Unknown.

Love of the Unknown, commingled with
eros
and
philia
. Desire without boundaries, no safe words, and I hardly care if this sort of thing
is not for everybody.
I steadfastly agree it’s for more than are willing to admit. But, the rest of you, take my hand, and let’s swim out past where our feet can touch the bottom.

She has lost count of exactly how many times winter and summer have traded places since the woman came upon her in the woods and took away her pelt. The woman also took her claws and her teeth and everything else that had made this girl a wolf. So complete was the theft that there are days now when she can hardly remember the way it was before, when she went about on four legs, instead of only two, when she had no need of words, but knew, instead, a near-infinite vocabulary of smells and tastes and subtler sounds than mere language can convey. She was sleeping when the woman found her, and the girl who was then a wolf dreamed of eyes the color of moss and spruce branches and dreamed, too, the sudden, wrenching pain of being divided from oneself. She awoke naked on the snow, truly naked for the first time in her life, and lay gasping beneath the watchful, star-stained sky as the green-eyed woman wrapped herself in stolen fur, then loped away into the night on another’s paws.

In the morning, the girl’s pack found her shivering in a rocky place, and they snarled and bared their flings at the helpless, paleskinned thing the woman had left behind. They understood, in their dim and certain way, the crime that had transpired in the night, how it was that a wolf could lose its skin to a human being. Wolves have never needed religion to fear such demons, and they have never needed folktales to pass that fear from mother to cub. Confused and frightened and faintly mourning the loss of the wolf she had been, the pack skulked away and left her alone in the rocky place, though she cried out after them, fashioning ugly, aching noises with her new tongue and vocal cords. They ignored her pleas for help, unable to recognize them as such and too afraid that the demon might come back for yet another change of skin.

Later in the day, having grown somewhat bolder, the wolves permitted her to take a few mouthfuls from a half-frozen elk carcass. And while she struggled to chew the meat with jaws wholly insufficient to the task, the pack sniffed her ass and licked at her sex, trying to discover some vestige of her former self. But they only succeeded in recalling the fullness of their fear, and soon they had nothing for the naked girl but bristling coats and black lips curled back to expose threatful, nipping incisors and canines. And so she left them, forever, and wandered down from the mountains and forests to the steel and glass and concrete city of men.